The Five Attractants

The Five Attractants. In Blackboard Fridays Episode 12, Jacob talks about Marketing. Need this implemented into your business? Talk to the international business advisor who can do exactly that – Contact Jacob, Learn More, or Subscribe for Updates.

Who is Jacob Aldridge, Business Coach?

“The smart and quirky advisor who gets sh!t done in business.”

Since April 2006, I’ve been an international business advisor providing bespoke solutions for privately-owned businesses with 12-96 employees.

At this stage you have proven your business model, but you’re struggling to turn aspirations into day-to-day reality. You are still responsible for all 28 areas of your business, but you don’t have the time or budget to hire 28 different experts.

You need 1 person you can trust who can show you how everything in your business is connected, and which areas to prioritise first.

That’s me.

Learn more here. Or Let’s chat.

Transcript

Hi! I’m Jacob Aldridge, talking here today about Sales and specifically the topic of getting more contact into your Sales Hourglass. Sales is a topic that comes up with so many of the small and medium-sized business owners I talk to, and yet when we analyse their business it’s not “sales” that is the challenge but rather “creating more relationships”.

Once those relationships, new prospective ideal clients, are in the Sales Hourglass, the business owner or their sales leaders do an amazing job of engaging them with a great brand promise and converting them to be clients. They just need more relationships coming in for a conversation!

So, I run them through this exercise: to look at the 5 Attractants and encourage them to think about their business and which of these 5 they may (or may not) be doing to attract more customers.

The 5 Attractants

Number one is extending your existing client base. When you look at the clients that you are currently servicing, is there a way to generate more revenue from them? The simplest option might be increasing your fees, which most business owners are reluctant to do too often, but it could also be that there are other products that these customers are buying or want to be buying that you could be selling them. The easiest customer to sell to is somebody who already knows you likes you and trusts you.

The second of the 5 Attractants is receiving referrals from those existing clients. Again, these are people who know you like you and trust you so why wouldn’t they want to tell their friends about you? If they’re great client then chances are the people that they know would also be great clients. Have you asked your clients for referrals and introductions? If not, why not?

The third is marketing. This is where you sometimes start to have to spend a little bit more money in order to generate people in as contacts. Getting great marketing support is worth its weight in gold because there’s an awful lot of opportunities out there. Some marketing initiatives are more expensive than others, and the adage that “half of my marketing dollars are wasted, I just don’t know which half” has never been more applicable than it is today.

While these aren’t in any order of importance, I find the further through the five we go, the more difficult these are for a business owner to choose to invest in because they take more time. Four is building strategic referral channels. These are not just people who already know you and like you and will reactively send you a referral when asked. These are people who will go out of their way because it’s in their best interest to send you your clients.

It takes time to build that level of relationship and when you build that well, you don’t need hundreds of these people running around. You’ve got a small number of referral channels who are out there actively promoting your business, start filling up the top of your hourglass and you’ll start filling out with ideal client, which are much easier to convert and much more profitable.

Lastly, scaled traction through a volume play. What are some of the activities that you could be doing to get you and your business in front of a whole range of people? A simple example, something like presenting at events or running a giant podcast or video series. This is the kind of opportunity that instead of getting in front of one person a time, gets in front of a hundred, five hundred, or thousands of potential relationships ready to enter your hourglass.

Evolving Your 5 Attractants

What got you here won’t get you there.

I use the word traction in my video quite deliberately, in reference to excellent book called Traction that I recommend to most business owners who are having this challenge.

A key takeaway from that book, which I encourage you to think about when you think about this topic, is that the strategies that work for your business today are not necessarily the strategies that are going to work for your business in the future.

Say you’re just in Start-Up. Your first client, or your first 10 clients coming in is where you need to focus.

But once you’ve been in business for a long time, you’ve got to go out there and do the attraction activities that bring you client opportunities 20, 50, 100, or 1000+ at a time. That means you need to start looking for more scaled opportunities.

Wherever your business is at its journey, if finding more contacts on top of your hourglass is your priotiy think about which one or two of these5 Attractants you’re going to focus on now … and which ones you’re going to focus on in the future.

I wish you the best of luck.

Next Steps

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